Model Sharing among Agents in a Concurrent Product Development Team

Abstract

We describe a project involving the use of software agents for concurrent engineering of electromechanical products. The agents are a mix of autonomous programs and software interfaces for human specialists in an engineering team. Our goal is to accelerate the design process by reducing delays associated with the exchange of design information, including models, constraints, objectives, and dependencies associated with each agent. Part of this effort involves methods for representing and exchanging design information in a human/machine-readable form. In this paper we focus on the sharing of information in models, such as the lumped-parameter models of electromechanical systems that engineers often use in the early stages of design. We first review the design information-sharing problem and examine the different levels of abstraction and detail at which such information is represented and shared. We then introduce a representation language and information-sharing infrastructure that we have employed for an agent-based concurrent engineering system. We illustrate some of the issues involved in our approach with a short scenario involving the redesign of an optical pick-up head for DVD (digital versatile disc) players. We then discuss our plans for extending the system to allow more general exchanges of engineering models among agents